


i only see daylight

by burnshoney



Category: RWBY
Genre: During Canon, F/F, Ficlet, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, Volume 7 (RWBY), color symbolism, this is both canon compliant AND canon divergent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:02:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26734801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnshoney/pseuds/burnshoney
Summary: Blake isn't the only one in need of a weapon repair, after all.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long
Comments: 4
Kudos: 109





	i only see daylight

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to the daylight bumbleby anthem supremacy gc on twitter, y'all are relentless and i love you endlessly. you wanted it, i delivered. hope it lives up to your expectations!
> 
> title, obviously, from the bumbleby anthem itself - daylight by taylor swift

Blake isn’t the only one offered upgrades and improvements, repairs to weapons. After the meeting with Ironwood, the General takes her aside and quietly offers to have her prosthetic scrapped and remade — the three gouges down the outside of her forearm are deep and ugly, exposing wiring and blackened by force, but Yang knows they’re purely cosmetic. Adam didn’t hit anything important.

Yang’s states her request and her eyes catch Blake’s as she’s escorted from the room. She thinks in a moment of clarity that she made sure Adam didn’t touch anything important, prosthetic arm or not be _damned_. Blake’s eyes burn curiously into her, open, and Yang tells herself the yearning there is something she must imagine, like the twitching of her fingers now anytime her hands are level with Blake’s. How they’ve been twitching, almost aching since that moment in the hovercraft on their way to Atlas, scars old and new alike raw as Gambol Shroud lay in blood-covered pieces. Yang had been sure to collect the two, after.

“Just fill them in, huh?” Pietro hums, inspecting her arm on the table. Heart in her throat Yang can simply nod. She feels off-balance in a peculiar way without her arm, but maybe it’s not the lack of prosthetic weight on her right side. Maybe it’s—

“Any color you’d like then? I can match the horrendous shade of yellow you spray painted such a fine and expensive piece of my life’s work with, if that’s what you’d like.” Pietro’s tone is light, joking, and his fingers are already working at the keyboard to generate the same sunny color as the rest when Yang finally manages to swallow thickly and force out the thought that’s been rattling around in her chest since that hovercraft flight.

Her voice is low, rough, thick with some emotion she can’t put a finger on but knows somewhere deep and personal. Somewhere intimate, even if she won’t give it the name it so craves. “Can...can you make it purple?”

Pietro’s eyes meet her through the hologram screen above the keyboard and after a moment, he grins. Nods. Breaks eye contact to fiddle with something Yang can’t see and she sags with relief. She’s exhausted in a way that feels like she’s just stepped out of the sparring ring at Beacon from just a few words — but steps beside Pietro, instructing him on the darker tones he programs into the equipment that’ll make tweaks on her arm before filling in the torn metal from Adam’s anger with the dark violet of Blake’s outfit, her hair, her pants when her knees hit the ground at that cliffside and she clung to Yang, sobbing, heart exposed on her sleeve in a way that wasn’t from the loss of her white leather duster.

(Blake will tell her later Adam cut it from her in the earliest moments of their fight, and Yang’s hand will find the curve of her hip under the new black-and-white leather that molds itself to her partner’s body like a second skin.)

But for now, Yang clicks her prosthetic back into place, clenches her fist one finger at a time per Pietro’s request, and spends the entire ride back to Atlas Academy from Mantle staring at the once-ripped edges of yellow metal filled seamlessly in with a purple so dark it’s almost black.

It’s fitting, somehow.

Blake knows it too, when she sees it, hair freshly sliced to her shoulders and looking more like herself in the leather that encases her body. RWBY and JNOR are all huddled together in their common room, showing off the upgrades to their outfits and weapons, but Yang only has eyes for her teammate, her partner. Blake.

She doesn’t realize she’s said her name until Blake is before her, gold eyes gleaming and strong, and Yang notes with some kind of happiness that even though her own boots are flat and Blake’s are heeled, Blake still has to tilt her chin up slightly to meet her lilac-blooming gaze.

Yang smiles. “Nice hair.”

Grinning back, Blake shrugs. There’s a new kind of self-assuredness to her, a lightness that permeates even the curve of her smile, and Yang thinks the victory of Adam’s defeat looks good on her.

“So what did Ironwood want?”

Yang can’t seem to tear her eyes away. She feels like a fossil, trapped in the amber of Blake’s irises. She thinks she would be content to stay this way forever.

“Weapon repairs were different for all of us,” she says instead and hopes her voice doesn’t sound as breathless as she feels. With Blake’s hair brushing her shoulders it’s got a pronounced wave to it, set free from the weight of when it was long, and Yang _understands_. She holds up her arm. “Didn’t want to be left out so I opted for some... _cosmetic_ changes.”

Blake giggles and the sound has warmth not from her semblance spreading through Yang’s chest. How has she never noticed until now how Blake laughs behind her hand, the way her eyes scrunch, the flakes of pure molten brass in her eyes?

“Guess you didn’t want to be outdone,” Blake says lightly, her voice still laced with amusement as she looks down and Yang sees the exact moment _she sees._

Blake’s laughter dies suddenly, like a flame being put out, and Yang watches the way her face changes. There’s the softening of the creases around her eyes, the way her mouth curves into a line only Yang has seen before. She treasures this sacred, secret moment as Blake’s mouth falls open gently and her fingertips reach out and almost touch the metal of her arm until she pulls back at the last second.

“Does it....did you...oh, _Yang.”_

Her name is breathed reverently and Yang thinks there’s never been a sweeter sound. She smiles softly, leaning their foreheads together to bump gently and Blake’s breath hitches at the reminder of this same position on the cliffside what feels like eons ago, now.

Blake leans into it as her fingertips finally brush the yellow and purple of Yang’s arm, welded together so perfectly there’s no seam between them when she runs the pads of her fingers over the borders one by one, before looking back up at Yang with the brightest, freest smile Yang’s ever seen.

“Thank you,” Blake murmurs, fingers playing now with the fixed cut closest to the ball of her wrist and Yang closes her eyes to breathe in her partner’s proximity she can’t seem to do with open eyes — not yet.

Yang’s words burn through her like a vow. “We made a promise, remember? We’re in this together, Blake. I’ve got your back.”

Their foreheads knock together again and Blake’s fingers intertwine with the metal ones of Yang’s prosthetic as she brings their hands to her mouth. Wordlessly, Yang watches her plant a kiss on each knuckle, red lips against yellow and gray metal, and blames her shivers on the colder air in Atlas from altitude. Blake’s eyes are daylight when she looks up and then with the hand not in Yang’s, reaches to unholster Gambol Shroud.

It’s Yang’s turn to go breathless, because right in the middle of the weapon, forging the two once-splintered pieces together, is a single line of _gold_. The same gold as Blake’s hair, the gold of Yang’s hair, the color of the sun burning overhead Blake held her hand as she stood off against her demons in the flesh and claimed they were protecting each _other._

The same gold of Yang’s semblance.

“I’ve got yours,” Blake whispers, so quiet that Yang knows if their noses weren’t close to brushing and her eyes weren’t fixed to the movement of her lipa, she would miss. “I meant what I said, Yang. I’m not leaving you. I’m staying by your side, no matter what. If you’ll have me.”

This not the place nor the time for everything Yang wants to say, wants to do, and knows Blake feels the same by the look in her eye. So instead of confessing how Blake makes the daylight look less like another twelve hours to survive through and something more to enjoy, instead of kissing those soft-looking lips that are slightly chapped in the way she’s been fantasizing over since Beacon, instead of wrapping Blake in her arms and pressing her mouth to every inch of her frame, Yang leans their foreheads together, cups the back of Blake’s head. Closes her eyes, breathes.

“I know. Thank you.”

And for now, _for now_ — it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on twitter to scream about these actual canon fucking soulmates @ WLWPYRRHA


End file.
